Archive for August, 2007

I’ve gotten a slew of “Why don’t you blog anymore?” comments lately, so here it is: the blogging’s back. No daily essays – just a “What I did yesterday” kind of affair.

Wednesday went like this…

Didn’t go to bed ’til five in the morning, because I was working on “Red State” – the horror flick we’re gonna do after “Zack and Miri Make a Porno”.

Woke up around 11. Talked to Jen a bit, then went back to work on the script.

Finished “Red State” around 1-ish. Totally different than anything I’ve written before. Very fucked up. Shortest script I’ve ever written, too, as well as the least dialogue-driven (not to say there’s not a lot of dialogue in it still; just not nearly as much as I’m used to writing). It’s a weird, relentlessly bleak and extremely unsettling affair, that “Red State” script. If you didn’t know I wrote it, and you read it, and I told you afterwards that I’d written it, you’d be like “Bullshit.”

After letting said story stew in my head for nearly a year, the actual writing of “Red State” didn’t take very long at all. Granted, I’d done about twenty pages of an outline that I worked off of, but from the moment I started the actual screenplay (from “INT AIRPORT – DAY”) to the moment I finished what I’d consider the first draft (“The End”), it was a five day affair.

When I’d gotten to page 87, I sent it to Scott, Malcolm and Bryan to read. All came back thumbs up. Mosier had excellent notes and suggestions, as per usual, so I went back, stripped stuff out, wrote new stuff, and wound up with 84 pages. 11 pages later, I was done. Like I said: shortest script (in terms of page count) I’ve ever written.

Mos was out when I finished writing, so the first person I sent the end pages to was Malcolm. Malcolm IM’s me back, quite simply, “I dare you.” That made me chuckle.

I take a few hours off to do an interview for a documentary about Jim Mahfood – the artist with whom I did three “Clerks” comics since ’98. After that, I went back to my office, got in touch with Mos, and sent him the new “Red State” pages. He called me after he was done reading to discuss the flick. He digs it alot, but admits he’s a touch apprehensive because, in terms of tone, it’s new territory for us. We jaw about the potential flick for a bit before I have to bring Harley and her friend out for ice cream.

Me, the kid and her friend opt against the Disney Malt Shop (or whatever the fuck the ice cream joint next to the El Cap is called), and hit 31 Flavors instead – but not before stopping at the video game store in the Target plaza to load up on some new Nintendo DS cartridges (are video games even called cartridges anymore? Or am I showing my age as a child of the Atari Generation?).

When we get home, I sack out on the bed, crack the laptop, and choose one of the many DVD’s I’d ordered from Amazon over the weekend (there were some holes in my library). First up is “Betrayed”, with Debra Winger and Tom Berenger. Jen’s in her spot on the couch, half-watching the flick, while I roll some poker on Full Tilt. She does some back-and-forth to Harley’s room, getting the girls settled in for their sleepover, while I blow my diet yet again, eating a whole container of Chocolate Covered Pretzels. That opens the door to a meatball sandwich. I’m such an idiotic fat fuck.

When the flick ends, I convince the wife to let me pop in “True Colors” – an early 90′s political melodrama starring John Cusack and James Spader that may, in fact, sport one of my least favorite motion picture scores of all time. Jen starts mocking the movie, so I yank it out of the player twenty minutes in and go with another Debra-Winger-as-Federal-Agent flick instead: “Black Widow”. Schwalbach falls asleep within the first fifteen minutes, which bugs me, because if I’d known she was gonna fall asleep so quickly, I’d have stuck with “True Colors”. I ride out “Black Widow” while rocking some Hold ‘Em, then adjourn to my office to watch the rest of “True Colors” without fear of my old lady waking up to give me further grief about a flick I haven’t seen in over ten years, but once owned on Laser Disc.

It’s now 6:30 Thursday morning, and I still haven’t gone to bed yet. I thought about tugging one out to try to induce sleep (and orgasm, natch), but I’m too tired to jerk off. Gonna let the dogs out and hit the hay.